Eta Devices, an MIT company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, gave the power amplifier inside smartphones a much-needed efficiency boost to help save electricity consumed around the world.

The power amplifier in a smartphone turns electricity into radio signals. They use transistors to consume power in either output signal mode or standby mode. The efficiency can only be improved if the lowest amount of standby power is used, but this has been tricky so far because using low-power standby mode and suddenly jumping to high-power output signal mode leads to distorted signals. So both modes are kept high.

The amplifiers waste over 65 percent of their energy, which leads to a warm, draining battery in phones that send huge files or stream video. More charging per day leads to more electricity used around the globe.

But Eta Devices is looking to change this. The company's new design, called asymmetric multilevel outphasing, is an electronic gearbox that chooses through various voltages that can be sent across a transistor and pinpoints the one that decreases power consumption the most. It does this 20 million times per second.

The new design not only does this when transmitting, but also receiving. When receiving, the gearbox sends out messages confirming when packets are received and letting the network know when they haven't. Packets are bits that make up a unit of Internet communications.

Eta Devices is looking to launch its new design in February 2013 at the Mobile World Congress. The technology will first be used to address power base stations in developing countries, where diesel-powered generators consume billions of dollars of fuel per year. From there, this new design will tackle the smartphone market around the world. It wants to create a smartphone chip with a single power amplifier that can juggle many different modes and frequencies.

Eta Devices expects that this new design can lead to smartphones using half the power they use today.